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Kosovo Events

Dr. Skendaj will discuss his book, Creating Kosovo: International Oversight and the Making of Ethical Institutions, which highlights efforts to build the police force, the central government, courts, and a customs service.

Drawing on recent scholarship and addressing recent controversies, John Lampe, traces the saga of Southeastern Europe from the explosive mixture of Balkan states and imperial borderlands before the First World War, through the trials that their successors faced during two world wars, the Cold War, and finally the wars of Yugoslavia's dissolution.

Why do ethnonational conflicts reach different degrees of violence? Why does violence continue to reoccur even after strong international intervention for conflict-resolution and democratization? To answer these questions, Maria Koinova combines research on civil wars with the study of non-violent majority-minority disputes by examining 5 degrees of violence in three cases – Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Kosovo – over a 20-year period.

Past post-conflict justice processes in the Balkan region were comprised of a variety of protagonists, such as governments, international institutions, and civil society. Mechanisms to cope with mass atrocities committed during the conflict in the 1990s included international trials in The Hague, domestic trials in many of the former states of Yugoslavia, and several truth commission attempts. In recent years there has also been a rise in youth activism to confront war crimes.

What drives a state's choice to assimilate, accommodate, or exclude ethnic groups within its territory? In this pathbreaking work on the international politics of nation-building, Harris Mylonas argues that a state's nation-building policies toward non-core groups - any aggregation of individuals perceived as an unassimilated ethnic group by the ruling elite of a state - are inﬂuenced by both its foreign policy goals and its relations with the external patrons of these groups.

On 19 April 2013, in Brussels, under the auspices of the European Union and EU foreign policy chief Baroness Catherine Ashton, the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo signed “The First Agreement of Principles governing Normalization of Relations.” While there is opposition in both Serbia and Kosovo to the Agreement, it has since been approved by both the parliaments in Belgrade and Prishtina. This information session explores the background to the Agreement and its political implications.

The forced migration of Muslims from the Balkans to Turkey is one of the least known movements of people in modern times. In "A Muslim Tale of Two Cities" Frances Trix focuses on urban Muslims from the central Balkans and the hometown associations they founded in Turkish cities.

In the post-Yugoslav context, members of these Muslim communities have largely self-identified as Bosniaks, an ethnic/national term that gained prominence among Bosnian Muslims in the period immediately following the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991 and the outbreak of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. While language policies in this region were centrally formulated in the joint state, with the dissolution of the Republic of Serbia and Montenegro in 2006, the two halves of the Sandžak experienced divergent language policies. In his presentation, Robert Greenberg, professor of linguistics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, argues that the division of the Sandžak may have been a catalyst for destabilizing and radicalized forces to emerge in the years following the formal Serbia/Montenegro split.

As Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo aim to harmonize their laws with the European Union, little is known about their legal culture and the extent to which European legal transfers are accepted in these countries. Using nationally representative surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews in Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo, this research project maps legal cultures in these countries and investigates the limits of anti-corruption reform.